10 Google Shopping Tips for Black November 2022

Black Friday is already around the corner. To be able to get the most out of the Black November sales events with Google Shopping campaigns, you have to be fully prepared. Check out the 10 useful Google Shopping tips for Black November 2022 below.

Tip #1. Check and Analyse the Statistics from Last Year’s Black November

Dive deep into the numbers and revelations from last year’s Black November first and foremost. This will help you build more or less plausible assumptions on how your industry and your shop in particular could perform in the upcoming chain of November sales events. Here are a couple of good sources with some food for thought:

• Black Friday in the United Kingdom (UK) - Statistics and Facts
• Black Friday 2021 by the Numbers: Shopping Behaviours in the UK

After digging into all the numbers and stats for the last year, don’t hurry to make the conclusions just yet (see tips #2, #3, and #4).

Tip #2. Study Market Forecasts for the Upcoming Black November

Together with the stats from last year, study and research the forecast and predictions for this year’s Black November. During the past 4 years, a lot of events have happened, and those have heavily affected eCommerce overall as well as seasonal sales events across the globe.

To put it mildly, we’ve been witnessing a decline in stability, so trying to look ahead and predict what could happen is a necessity now, not an extra option, especially when it comes to forecasting the performance of a specific industry or overall spending on Black Friday from the shoppers.

Tip # 3. Analyse Your Store’s Black Friday Performance from Last Year

Now, it’s time to look at your store’s performance from last year. In general, you should

• check which products did well and which were underperforming
• check which attributes, product descriptions, and feed/feeds showed efficiency
• evaluate your 2021 Black Friday campaign performance overall. 

Tip # 4. Audit Your Current Product Data

So, now you have the market stats from 2021, the Black Friday forecast for 2022, and dissected performance stats of your store from last year. The next step is to analyse your current product line and the performance of your shop. 

You should pay extra attention to the product data. Checking your Google Shopping feed for errors, e.g. the correctness of usual and sale prices, GTINs, etc, would be the first thing to do. Run Bidbrain feed checker to quickly find errors you may have missed before the products are uploaded to Google Merchant center, and more. 

Only after you will have looked into all the data and information—the 2021 data, the predictions for 2022, and your store’s stats and data—you’ll be able to make plausible assumptions about your store’s performance during the upcoming Black November.  

Tip # 5. Set up the Black November Google Shopping Campaign 

Ok, now that you’re fully armed with Black November knowledge and insights as well as got all of your store’s product data fixed, it is time to set up the Black Friday Google Shopping campaign. Basically, you should do the following.

• Create a separate campaign with items related only to Black November. For convenience, try setting up several campaigns if you’re not only aiming at Black Friday but also Cyber Monday, St. Andrew's Day, or any other holiday or sales event that is happening around the date as Black Friday in your country or region.
• Set the goals for your Google Shopping Black Friday campaign. Clearly decide what you want to achieve with the campaign, e.g. increase revenue, ditch the unsold stock, etc. 
• Make sure your Black November sales campaign has a higher priority than usual campaigns.
• Allocate a separate, bigger budget. Don’t mix the money you’ll be spending on the Black Friday sales campaign with your overall budget.
• Label the ads in the right way to differentiate them from other campaigns.

Tip # 6. Make Sure the Feed Attributes are Optimised for Black November

The titles and descriptions of the products you’re pushing through Google Shopping to your potential customers should be fully optimised for the Black Friday sales.

When adding titles to the products on your Black Friday catalog, be distinct when creating titles for product variants, like size, material, colour, etc. See some industry-specific examples of good Google Shopping product titles above.

Add [sale_price] attribute, discount number, or price drop annotations to highlight the before and after prices.

Use custom labels. With Shopping campaigns, you can use custom labels to subdivide the products in your campaign using values of your choosing. For example, you can use custom labels to indicate that products are seasonal, on clearance, best sellers, etc. With Bidbrain, you can use an unlimited number of custom labels.

Tip # 7. Set up the Bidding Strategy

The approaches to the Black Friday bidding strategy on Google Shopping are the following. 

• If you are using automated strategies or target ROAS/Performance Max, increase your target CPA or decrease your target ROAS. 
• Increase your bids if you are using manual bidding.
• Use bid adjustments to increase bids for all products on sale.
• Use seasonal bid adjustments for Performance Max campaigns.

For the past years, AI has become really good at optimising and implementing ad bidding strategies. For example, with Bidbrain AI bidding you can

• maximize return on ad spend for each product 
• activate products without historical data—Bidbrain’s activation algorithm finds the hidden high performers in your feed
• set up your product segments to let the AI work towards custom target ROAS or POAS
• enjoy fully transparent data that belong to you and help to visualize the bidding & keywords data on the product level
• maximise your ROAS and give you full control over your sales volumes
• Use Bidbrain Sale Push campaign type that will maximise the daily number of product impressions—this campaign type will adjust hourly bids hourly to find the sweet spot.

Also, our customer care team is always happy to help you with developing the best bidding strategy. 

Tip # 8. Use Promotions Feed

Try using a promotion feed that specifies which promotion each product should belong to. This way you won’t need to alter the main feed product by product each time you’d need to release a promotion. A product from a promotion feed will also show up in your advertisements and will make your product offerings stand out.

Tip # 9. Schedule Multiple Updates

During big seasonal events, like Black November, the stock is usually running out fast, so it is important to keep your feed updated. With Bidbrain, you can

• always keep your feed fresh and updated 
• automatically push the sales items harder during seasonal sales 
• maximise impressions and clicks during the peak days.

Tip # 10. Make Sure the Product Landing Pages are All Set

Source: SavvyRevenue

Statistics show that up to 60% of the products on Google Shopping lead to the customer buying a different product than the one they clicked on. This means that you should invest time and effort in Black Friday tweaks across your product landing pages: push your Black Friday campaigns/voucher and sale prices on all your product landing pages within the Black November campaign.